Machine Learning is the study of methods for programming computers to learn. Computers are applied to a wide range of tasks, and for most of these it is relatively easy for programmers to design and implement the necessary software. However, there are many tasks for which this is difficult or impossible. These can be divided into four general categories. First, there are problems for which there exist no human experts. For example, in modern automated manufacturing facilities, there is a need to predict machine failures before they occur by analyzing sensor readings. Because the machines are new, there are no human experts who can be interviewed by a programmer to provide the knowledge necessary to build a computer system. A machine learning system can study recorded data and subsequent machine failures and learn prediction rules. Second, there are problems where human experts exist, but where they are unable to explain their expertise. This is the case in many perceptual tasks, such as speech recognition, hand-writing recognition, and natural language understanding. Virtually all humans exhibit expert-level abilities on these tasks, but none of them can describe the detailed steps that they follow as they perform them. Fortunately, humans can provide machines with examples of the inputs and correct outputs for these tasks, so machine learning algorithms can learn to map the inputs to the outputs. Third, there are problems where phenomena are changing rapidly. In finance, for example, people would like to predict the future behavior of the stock market, of consumer purchases, or of exchange rates. These behaviors change frequently, so that even if a programmer could construct a good predictive computer program, it would need to be rewritten frequently. A learning program can relieve the programmer of this burden by constantly modifying and tuning a set of learned prediction rules. Fourth, there are applications that need to be customized for each computer user separately. Consider, for example, a program to filter unwanted electronic mail messages. Different users will need different filters. It is unreasonable to expect each user to program his or her own rules, and it is infeasible to provide every user with a software engineer to keep the rules up-to-date. A machine learning system can learn which mail messages the user rejects and maintain the filtering rules automatically. Machine learning addresses many of the same research questions as the fields of statistics, data mining, and psychology, but with differences of emphasis. Statistics focuses on understanding the phenomena that have generated the data, often with the goal of testing different hypotheses about those phenomena. Data mining seeks to find patterns in the data that are understandable by people. Psychological studies of human learning aspire to understand the mechanisms underlying the various learning behaviors exhibited by people (concept learning, skill acquisition, strategy change, etc.).

Machine learning

This paper contains a large literature review in the research field of Text Summarisation (TS) based on Human Language Technologies (HLT). TS helps users manage the vast amount of information available, by condensing documents' content and extracting the most relevant facts or topics included in them. The rapid development of emerging technologies poses new challenges to this research field, which still need to be solved. Therefore, it is essential to analyse its progress over the years, and provide an overview of the past, present and future directions, highlighting the main advances achieved and outlining remaining limitations. With this purpose, several important aspects are addressed within the scope of this survey. On the one hand, the paper aims at giving a general perspective on the state-of-the-art, describing the main concepts, as well as different summarisation approaches, and relevant international forums. Furthermore, it is important to stress upon the fact that the birth of new requirements and scenarios has led to new types of summaries with specific purposes (e.g. sentiment-based summaries), and novel domains within which TS has proven to be also suitable for (e.g. blogs). In addition, TS is successfully combined with a number of intelligent systems based on HLT (e.g. information retrieval, question answering, and text classification). On the other hand, a deep study of the evaluation of summaries is also conducted in this paper, where the existing methodologies and systems are explained, as well as new research that has emerged concerning the automatic evaluation of summaries' quality. Finally, some thoughts about TS in general and its future will encourage the reader to think of novel approaches, applications and lines to conduct research in the next years. The analysis of these issues allows the reader to have a wide and useful background on the main important aspects of this research field.

Text summarisation in progress: a literature review

Keywords can be considered as condensed versions of documents and short forms of their summaries. In this paper, the problem of automatic extraction of keywords from documents is treated as a supervised learning task. A lexical chain holds a set of semantically related words of a text and it can be said that a lexical chain represents the semantic content of a portion of the text. Although lexical chains have been extensively used in text summarization, their usage for keyword extraction problem has not been fully investigated. In this paper, a keyword extraction technique that uses lexical chains is described, and encouraging results are obtained.

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Using lexical chains for keyword extraction

Text messaging through the Internet or cellular phones has become a major medium of personal and commercial communication In the same time, flames (such as rants, taunts, and squalid phrases) are offensive/abusive phrases which might attack or offend the users for a variety of reasons An automatic discriminative software with a sensitivity parameter for flame or abusive language detection would be a useful tool Although a human could recognize these sorts of useless annoying texts among the useful ones, it is not an easy task for computer programs In this paper, we describe an automatic flame detection method which extracts features at different conceptual levels and applies multi-level classification for flame detection While the system is taking advantage of a variety of statistical models and rule-based patterns, there is an auxiliary weighted pattern repository which improves accuracy by matching the text to its graded entries.

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Offensive language detection using multi-level classification

In Statistics-Based Summarization - Step One: Sentence Compression, Knight and Marcu (Knight and Marcu, 2000) (KM Knight and Marcu use a corpus of 1035 training sentences. More data is not easily available, so in addition to improving the original K&M noisy-channel model, we create unsupervised and semi-supervised models of the task. Finally, we point out problems with modeling the task in this way. They suggest areas for future research.

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Supervised and Unsupervised Learning for Sentence Compression

Topic segmentation can be used as a preprocessing step in numerous natural language processing applications. In this short paper, we will discuss how we adapted our segmentation algorithm for automatic summarization.

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The use of topic segmentation for automatic summarization

Previous work by Pedersen, Purandare and Kulkarni (2005) has resulted in an unsupervised method of name discrimination that represents the context in which an ambiguous name occurs using second order co–occurrence features. These contexts are then clustered in order to identify which are associated with different underlying named entities. It also extracts descriptive and discriminating bigrams from each of the discovered clusters in order to serve as identifying labels. These methods have been shown to perform well with English text, although we believe them to be language independent since they rely on lexical features and use no syntactic features or external knowledge sources. In this paper we apply this methodology in exactly the same way to Bulgarian, English, Romanian, and Spanish corpora. We find that it attains discrimination accuracy that is consistently well above that of a majority classifier, thus providing support for the hypothesis that the method is language independent.

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An unsupervised language independent method of name discrimination using second order co-occurrence features

The technologies for single- and multi-document summarization that are described and evaluated in this article can be used on heterogeneous texts for different summarization tasks. They refer to the extraction of important sentences from the documents, compressing the sentences to their essential or relevant content, and detecting redundant content across sentences. The technologies are tested at the Document Understanding Conference, organized by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, USA in 2002 and 2003. The system obtained good to very good results in this competition. We tested our summarization system also on a variety of English Encyclopedia texts and on Dutch magazine articles. The results show that relying on generic linguistic resources and statistical techniques offer a basis for text summarization.

Generic technologies for single- and multi-document summarization

Multidocument question answering text summarization using topic signatures

In many information retrieval and selection tasks it is valuable to score how much a text is about a certain entity and to compute how much the text discusses the entity with respect to a certain viewpoint. In this paper we are interested in giving an aboutness score to a text, when the input query is a person name and we want to measure the aboutness with respect to the biographical data of that person. We present a graph-based algorithm and compare its results with other approaches.

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Roxana Angheluta

Papers

The use of topic segmentation for automatic summarization

An unsupervised language independent method of name discrimination using second order co-occurrence features

Generic technologies for single- and multi-document summarization

Multidocument question answering text summarization using topic signatures

Measuring Aboutness of an Entity in a Text